As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to these users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may vary with respect to the type of information handled; the methods for handling the information; the methods for processing, storing or communicating the information; the amount of information processed, stored, or communicated; and the speed and efficiency with which the information is processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include or comprise a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
An information handling system may include a hard disk drive backplane, such as that shown in FIG. 1. Backplane 105 includes 8 hard disk drives 1101 . . . 8 a storage enclosure processor (SEP) 115 manages the detection of the hard disk drives 1101 . . . and the operation of LEDs of the backplane 105. SEPs are typically custom components that support a fixed number of hard disk drives. For example, the SEP 115 shown in FIG. 1 supports eight hard disk drives. If the backplane supports fewer drives, then there is wasted capacity of the SEP 115. If the backplane contained more drives, additional storage enclosure processors would be necessary. SEPs, such as SEP 115, typically require their own computing intelligence (e.g., a processor) and memory (e.g., one or both of RAM and ROM). SEPs are generally configured to communicate with other portions of the information handling system 100 with point-to-point signaling. Any device that needs to get information from the SEP or convey information to the SEP must be directly connected to the SEP.
To address the limitations, approaches to drive management using multiple SEPs have been proposed. These solutions, however, tend to increase the pin count and cost of the backplanes. Therefore, a need exists to maintain the functionality provided by SEPs in a more scalable architecture.